ScaleArc Bloghttp://www.www.scalearc.com
The RSS Blog Feed for ScaleArc - Scalable Databases SimplifiedThu, 24 May 2018 09:00:00 GMTHelping Inmates Stay Connected to Familyhttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/11/15/helping-inmates-stay-connected-to-family
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<img src="http://www.scalearc.com/media/blog/71BB9930-5056-9F3C-57387C1B9F997E8E/images/o/telmate-squarelogo-1479510094244.png" style="width: 149px; padding-right: 12px; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 5px 0px;" alt="Blog image">Today,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/press/2017/11/15/scalearc-improves-uptime-and-performance-for-telmate-video-and-audio-communications">ScaleArc shared the news</a> that Telmate, which provides video and phone communications for inmates, relies on ScaleArc to improve uptime and performance for its teleconferencing services.</p><p>Research shows how vital it is for prisoners to stay in touch with friends and family while they’re in prison. Dr. James Woodall, who is co-director of the UK’s Centre for Health Promotion Research, has done research for more than a decade on this topic. He has studied and shown the ways in which <a href="https://drjameswoodall.wordpress.com/2015/03/01/ten-reasons-why-keeping-prisoners-in-touch-with-their-families-is-so-important/" style="font-size: 14px;">preserving family connections offers great benefits</a> for prisoners, families, and wider society, including reducing the likelihood of re-offending. Dr. Woodall notes:</p><p><em>The role of the family cannot be underestimated – for most people the family offers a feeling of belonging and provides support, both in practical and emotional ways. More often than not, they are there to offer guidance and provide listening ear when needed.</em></p><p>Prisons, recognizing these benefits, look to technology to supplement in-person visits or enable communications with distant family and friends. Telmate is a top choice, providing a range of telecommunications services for both inmates and prison employees.</p><p>The company augmented its open source MySQL deployment with ScaleArc. “We needed to ensure fault tolerance and better throughput on our mission-critical databases,” said Alex Alexander, database architect at Telmate. “We looked at a number of open source options, but ScaleArc proved to be much more robust and had been deployed in a much larger number of production environments.”</p><p>ScaleArc’s ability to <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/how-it-works/availability-features/read-write-split">distribute database traffic</a> across multiple servers means Telmate can scale its database infrastructure without making changes to its applications. Plus, ScaleArc <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/achieve-continuous-availability">protects the service from disruption</a> during database failover.</p><p>ScaleArc is proud it’s able to help keep Telmate’s services up and running fast to serve this vulnerable population.</p>Wed, 15 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMThttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/11/15/helping-inmates-stay-connected-to-familyScaleArc on Google – Hitting the Cloud Trifectahttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/10/12/scalearc-on-google-hitting-the-cloud-trifecta
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AWS, Azure, and now Google! ScaleArc now supports all three of the leading cloud platforms. We’re super excited that ScaleArc’s software for enabling continuous availability and simplifying the move to the cloud now&nbsp;<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/press/2017/10/12/scalearc-s-software-now-available-on-google-cloud-launcher-marketplace">supports Google Cloud Platform</a>. We’ve also helped a customer already take advantage of our software on GCP – double win!</p><p>By supporting GCP, ScaleArc now adds Google’s customers to roster of organizations that can tap ScaleArc for better application uptime, automatic scale out, and faster app performance. We’ve already been working&nbsp;our&nbsp;<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/get-to-the-cloud-faster">magic on AWS and Azure.</a></p><p>Having our software on the Google Launcher marketplace means GCP customers can enable ScaleArc’s services on their own. Our software deploys transparently between application servers and databases, intelligently routing database queries to optimize application uptime and performance. We’ve integrated both our ScaleArc for SQL Server and ScaleArc for MySQL software on GCP.</p><p>Our long-standing customer<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/case-study/sazze"> Sazze</a> has taken advantage of ScaleArc’s support of GCP to move several eCommerce workloads into the platform. The ScaleArc software makes it easy for customers like Sazze to benefit from elasticity in the cloud. </p><p>GCP customers can gain additional advantages, using the ScaleArc software to:</p><ul><li>Make database failover invisible to users of the applications or websites on GCP by supporting&nbsp;<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/how-it-works/availability-features/automated-database-failover">application-transparent failover</a></li><li>Improve uptime and performance by running&nbsp;<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/enable-active-active-architectures">active/active operations</a>, either between on-premise and GCP resources or between GCP regions/zones</li><li>Support<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/achieve-continuous-availability"> high availability (HA) operation</a>s for database clusters, working with Google Cloud Load Balancing to enable HA within or across GCP regions/zones</li><li>Enable<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/why-scalearc/use-cases/database-scalability"> instant scale out</a> with automatic read/write split across multiple database servers with no application code changes</li><li>Deliver users the<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/increase-app-performance"> fastest application performance</a> by dynamically load balancing database traffic across read-only servers</li><li>Avoid serving stale data by&nbsp;<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/how-it-works/availability-features/replication-awareness">monitoring replication lag&nbsp;</a>and avoiding sending traffic to out-of-synch database servers</li><li>Maximize application performance by leveraging ScaleArc’s&nbsp;<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/how-it-works/performance-features/transparent-in-memory-query-caching">app-transparent caching</a> and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/how-it-works/performance-features/connection-pooling-and-multiplexing">connection pooling</a> and management and query routing</li></ul><p>We look forward to enabling always-up, always-fast apps on GCP!</p>cloudThu, 12 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMThttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/10/12/scalearc-on-google-hitting-the-cloud-trifectaMore ScaleArc Magic – Speeding up Apps with Wrapped Transactionshttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/9/7/more-scalearc-magic-speeding-up-apps-with-wrapped-transactions
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A lot of applications are coded in a way that inhibits performance when you pair them with modern, scaled out databases. What’s the problem? It’s called wrapped transactions. And ScaleArc just solved this problem for apps on SQL Server.</p><p>
The term “wrapped transactions” means every database query looks like a write. What apps use wrapped transaction? eCommerce apps like Hybris, apps written in frameworks such as Hibernate or Spring, and even new cloud-native development platforms like Pivotal Cloud Foundry. In other words, lots of business-critical apps use wrapped transactions.</p><p>The root of the problem is that if every query is a write, all the traffic from that application has to go to the primary server in a database cluster. So when you invest in that modern database, with readable secondary servers, you get nothing back from your investment because no traffic will go to any of the servers except the primary. You wasted a bunch of money, and your app’s going to run slowly.</p><p>The ScaleArc innovation lies in our ability to “see inside” transactions, distinguish reads and writes, and load balance the traffic. So if a series of reads come through in a wrapped transaction, ScaleArc will perform automatic read/write split and send reads to the readable secondaries. The ScaleArc software will also load balance those reads, sending traffic to the fastest performing server so your application delivers the highest possible performance. </p><p>Sometimes in wrapped transactions, writes are immediately followed by reads. To ensure data integrity, as soon as the ScaleArc software sees a write, it sends that query and all subsequent queries for the rest of the transaction to the primary server. That way, if the read needs to pull from the data just added or changed with the write, the read will be accurate.</p><p>This ScaleArc magic is translating into 2x to 8x increases in application performance for our customers. And this feature will also help customers move more applications into the cloud. In the cloud, every app has to talk to multiple database servers, and ScaleArc’s read/write split makes your apps automatically cloud ready.</p><p>We shared these results with David Klee, founder of Heraflux and a Microsoft Data Platform MVP. His company spends a lot of time helping customers optimize app performance. And he’s seen plenty of examples where they get stuck – they can’t touch the code because it’s off-the-shelf software, or wrapped transactions mean modern databases can’t help.</p><p>He shared his formal views on our new capabilities in our press release announcing the feature. His more candid take: “Wow – that’s really cool. And that’s going to help a LOT of companies.”</p><p>We think he’s right, and we’re excited to bring our ScaleArc magic to an even broader set of applications!</p><p>Read the full press release.</p>Thu, 07 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMThttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/9/7/more-scalearc-magic-speeding-up-apps-with-wrapped-transactionsPrepping for Black Friday? You’re Late!http://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/8/15/prepping-for-black-friday-you-re-late
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Online retailers are expecting the biggest holiday shopping period ever this year, and we’ve all seen the impact on local malls, with retailers like Gymboree, Lane Bryant and Michael Kors closing thousands of stores.</p><p>You’ve got to be ready now for the onslaught of traffic that will come on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We surveyed more than 1,000 Americans and found that 52% of US consumers already expect retailers to have a major outage during the holiday shopping season – with Walmart (23%), BestBuy (17%), Macy’s (16%) and Target (16%) noted as having the most risk of crashing. </p><p>So what’s the prep checklist look like? </p><p>Should be done already: </p><ul><li>Build for high availability and resiliency: You want to ensure that your infrastructure can scale beyond your expectations of traffic and incorporates a high availability (HA) strategy that also delivers resiliency in case of server failure – be that web server, app server, or database server.</li><li>Web load balancers have proven invaluable for enabling resiliency at the web tier: With connection management, load distribution, and the ability to detect and route around downed web servers, these devices have enabled zero downtime at the web tier. The data tier is the next frontier.</li><li>Investigate how technologies such as database load balancing software can shield your apps – and therefore your customers – from database downtime, enabling zero downtime at the app tier.</li><li>Add new features and new technology: If you have major infrastructure or architecture upgrades to do, this is the time. Even if these features and technologies do not apply specifically to Black Friday efforts, you need to get them into play so you know how they affect the entire system.</li><li>Work towards a goal of zero downtime: Seamless and immediate database failover is central to achieving zero downtime. Keeping your customers logged in and productive is paramount to Black Friday sales numbers.</li><li>Review your infrastructure with an eye toward avoiding downtime from maintenance windows: This approach includes maintenance for adding new services. Because database load balancing software is transparent to the application layer, no application changes are required to scale, optimize, or add resiliency to new or existing applications and services.</li><li>Increase site performance: It’s time to rev up the engine that will boost site performance to easily handle Black Friday traffic loads, delivering consistent and excellent customer experience. When it comes to databases, application performance bottlenecks tend to fall into three main categories: 1. poor query performance, 2. lack of concurrent capacity to handle high user loads, and 3. connection pooling / management issues. Look for technologies that can address these challenges capabilities.</li></ul><p>September </p><ul><li>Implement the system freeze and test all components: August is the time to stop making changes to your infrastructure. While most organizations have to occasionally accept last-minute updates beyond this point in time, most components should enter a freeze now.</li><li>This time is also good for delving into analytics again to see where you have potential weaknesses in the system: Start applying load tests to see how all your infrastructure changes are holding up. Testing at high load now gives you time to address any issues you uncover.</li></ul><p>October </p><ul><li>See how natural load increases are affecting your system: By early October, you’ll likely start to see traffic increase on a daily basis. Natural traffic growth can provide a better test backdrop than they load testing you engineer because it typically reveals surprises. Your Black Friday preparations should all be in place by now.</li></ul><p>November </p><ul><li>Analyze the traffic: Organizations with high Black Friday loads report Black Friday traffic being a 10X to 15X spike over rest-of-year numbers. Some organizations see as much as a 5X spike on Black Friday compared to Thanksgiving Thursday – it can be a dramatic traffic ramp.</li><li>Make any last-minute adjustments: If you’ve been leveraging analytics throughout the year, any last-minute adjustments should be minor, and most likely based on an unexpected traffic increase in October that signals higher traffic rates on Black Friday.</li></ul><p>December </p><ul><li>You made it! Wipe your brow, grab a beer, and evaluate what just happened – it’s time for the postmortem. Robust analytics with troubleshooting tools are paramount. Now is also the time to schedule January priorities.</li></ul><p>Online retailers who follow these steps will be ready for the onslaught of traffic that will come their way this holiday shopping season. This will mean continuous uptime of their web and mobile sites, happy and returning customers and more revenue.</p>Black-FridayTue, 15 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMThttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/8/15/prepping-for-black-friday-you-re-lateWhy the Cloud is Not Your White Knighthttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/7/20/why-the-cloud-is-not-your-white-knight
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Every organization is looking at how to leverage the cloud, and its promise of simplicity is enticing. The reality, though, is that it’ll take some work to enjoy the benefits of elasticity and flexibility in the cloud.</p><p>
And DBaaS offerings like Amazon RDS and Azure SQL Database are no different. Even these “full service” cloud operations will introduce new challenges you’ll need to overcome.&nbsp;</p><p>Let’s review the chief obstacles to achieving performance and availability with cloud database services.</p><p>Network latency: You get no guarantee on device location, and you can’t control the hop count in your tech stack in the cloud. These hops add latency, which could trigger multiple reconnect attempts. </p><p>I/O limitations: The more the cloud provider uses shared resources, the worse the I/O bottleneck gets. And noisy neighbors increase the problem. It’s typically too expensive to buy really big servers in the cloud too, so you need scale out instead.</p><p><strong>Scalability:</strong> Cloud architecture are great at scaling the data tier – the problem is, how do your apps tap into the power of those scaled out infrastructures? AWS RDS and Azure SQL Database will let you easily create readable secondary databases, but you’ll need to re-write your application code to use them.</p><p><strong>Hypervisor challenges:</strong> The multi-tenant environment of the cloud introduces contention for hypervisor resources. And if the cloud provider moves you to a less busy server, your app just went down. Users will get lots of app error messages, and the app will often hang or need to be restarted.</p><p><strong>Availability:</strong> Just because you’re running in the cloud doesn’t mean you aren’t responsible for architecting for failover. The service may fail over the database – you’ve got to keep your app running. </p><p>Building in an abstraction layer between your apps and databases addresses these cloud challenges, because now you’ve got a buffer between your apps and the database. Read more about how&nbsp;<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/wplp-hazy-horizon">ScaleArc solves cloud challenges</a>, and accelerate your journey to the cloud.</p>cloudThu, 20 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMThttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/7/20/why-the-cloud-is-not-your-white-knightEnabling IOT Scale with No Code Changeshttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/7/5/enabling-iot-scale-with-no-code-changes
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ScaleArc customer Sixgill faces a tough data challenge – how do you scale your infrastructure to handle millions of new inputs, driven by location-based marketing at global events like the Rugby World Cup, without having to build and code for major fluctuations in infrastructure?</p><p>
Sixgill’s answer is to pair ScaleArc with AWS. That combination gives Sixgill all the flexibility they need to scale up and scale down in a “pay for what you use” model. The extra edge ScaleArc enables is gaining that adaptability with no code changes.</p><p>
Sixgill uses ScaleArc to scale the underlying SQL Server database infrastructure on demand. “We don’t have to change our code to leverage more services on the back end,” explains John Dohm, CTO for Sixgill. The company generates as much as 3 TB of data a day, off data coming from 50 million devices.</p><p>
ScaleArc’s software, acting as an abstraction layer that sits between the applications and the databases, means John and his team can adjust the data tier with no impact on applications. The software also enables distributed processing, so he’s been able to increase performance of the applications by hundreds of percentages.</p><p>
Check out&nbsp;John’s video&nbsp;explaining the power of ScaleArc and AWS. Or download the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/case-study/sixgill-1">case study</a> to learn even more&nbsp;about how he tackled his scalability challenges.&nbsp;</p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/e3n5VgWl98s" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>scalearcWed, 05 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMThttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/7/5/enabling-iot-scale-with-no-code-changesMore Accolades for ScaleArc: “Most Innovative IT Software”http://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/6/14/more-accolades-for-scalearc-most-innovative-it-software
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ScaleArc has done it again, with its software taking Gold in the 12th Annual 2017 IT World Awards<em>. </em>The company <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/press/2017/6/14/scalearc-wins-gold-2017-it-world-award" style="font-size: 14px;">announced today</a> that its software for Amazon Aurora took top honors in the Most Innovative IT Software category.&nbsp;</p><p>As more enterprises embrace cloud and hybrid deployments, they’re realizing that along with the elasticity and flexibility of cloud comes some unique challenges. The ScaleArc software <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/why-scalearc/use-cases/cloud-migration" style="font-size: 14px;">mitigates these cloud challenges</a> to improve the uptime and performance of apps in hybrid/cloud and on-prem environments.</p><p>The Amazon Aurora version of the ScaleArc software enables app-transparent failover, zero downtime maintenance, and faster throughput – all with no code changes to the application. This functionality <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/press/2016/11/29/scalearc-s-database-load-balancing-software-now-compatible-with-amazon-aurora">enhances the capabilities of the Aurora PaaS</a> offering.</p><p>The IT World Award draws on industry and peer recognition to determine its winners, and we’re proud to have our software – which enables unparalleled business continuity – honored with this recognition. As our CEO commented, the award “salutes the achievements of both our exemplary team here at ScaleArc and our valued customers, who inspire us every day.”</p><p>Congrats to the entire ScaleArc team!</p>scalearcdatabaseWed, 14 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMThttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/6/14/more-accolades-for-scalearc-most-innovative-it-softwareBetting on Black Friday Bedlamhttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/6/5/betting-on-black-friday-bedlam-1
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Every year, multiple retailers duke it out for worst outage of the online holiday shopping season. This year, as ScaleArc has already started working with clients on prepping for the Black Friday traffic onslaught, we thought it’d be fun to get ahead of the game, asking folks now about failures they anticipate next November.</p><p>
To learn more, we ran a quick&nbsp;<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/press/2017/5/23/scalearc-study-majority-of-americans-expect-a-top-retailer-to-have-a-website-outage-this-holiday-shopping-season">“Christmas in May” survey,</a> asking which retailers people expect to be impacted. Turns out, the majority of Americans (52 percent) do indeed expect that a top retailer will have an online meltdown during this fall’s holiday shopping season.</p><p>
Walmart took top prize on the list of retailers expected to have a major outage this holiday season – here’s how some of the big retailers stack up:</p><ul>
<li>Walmart – 23%</li>
<li>Best Buy – 17%</li>
<li>Macy’s – 16%</li>
<li>Target – 16%</li>
<li>Amazon – 14%</li>
<li>Costco – 7%</li></ul><p>
And disgruntled shoppers won’t go quietly into that good night – more than half said they take an action:</p><ul>
<li>leave the website – 26%</li>
<li>visit a competitor’s website – 21%</li></ul><p>
We’ve seen the Black Friday disasters up close – and we want to help retailers avoid the same fate. So often the database is the culprit – it’s the hardest part of the technology stack to scale, and even when it’s got resiliency built in, it’s hard to enable apps to leverage that automatic failover.</p><p>
To help retailers, we solicited best practices from our many retail and SaaS customers who routinely experience significant traffic spikes and pulled together the findings into our “<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/wp-black-friday-checklist">Black Friday Prep Checklist.</a>” You can also <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/media/resources/asset/E9C9FA0C-5056-9F3C-57EEE1C482B1D501/infographic-black-friday-prep-timeline.pdf">check out this infographic</a> that pulls the best practices into a clock timeline.</p><p>
Now’s the time to make sure your IT team is taking all the steps they can to avoid downtime during the Black Friday onslaught.</p>Mon, 05 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMThttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/6/5/betting-on-black-friday-bedlam-1A Power Outage? BA Has a Lot of Explaining to Dohttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/6/2/a-power-outage-ba-has-a-lot-of-explaining-to-do
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The massive flight cancellations and delays at British Airways, and resulting haircut on the stock price of its parent company, highlight people’s intolerance for digital disruption these days. The airline has cited a power surge following an outage as the culprit, saying the event took out a large data center. The big question is why disruption of one data center – even a major one – could have such widespread ramifications for a global company like BA.</p><p>Few companies can withstand an outage of more than a few minutes without significant financial impact these days. For some organizations, even a few minutes of downtime would prove incredibly costly (think of the $66K Amazon is reported to lose per minute of being offline). Given this significant financial pain, organizations have invested heavily in backup and disaster recovery (DR) systems. As a global airline, BA most certainly had such systems in place – indeed, the company has commented that its DR systems did not intervene as expected.</p><p>Admitting your DR didn’t work raises eyebrows, of course. BA should have had data center systems in place that would enable it to withstand even a massive disruption in electrical service. Other locations should have kicked in to take over operations.</p><p>But the even bigger question is why a company like BA would still be relying on DR at all. How could it be OK for BA to have a “disaster” in one location, then have systems elsewhere turn on to help “recover” from the disaster. </p><p>DR just doesn’t cut it anymore. Your customers, partners, and internal users all need seamless access to your apps and data – without that, your business can’t run. So what’s better than DR? <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/why-scalearc/use-cases/automated-failover-ha">Continuous availability</a>. With that architecture, no matter what failures happen at a device, data center, or cloud region level, the same operations are already running in other locations and they simply take on more of the load.</p><p>How does IT deliver continuous availability? By running <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/why-scalearc/use-cases/active-active-data-centers">active/active architectures</a> with applications, servers, databases, and network capacity operating in multiple locations at once. This approach, with traffic running across a broader geographical domain – and often spanning on-premise and cloud-based resources – provides far greater resiliency at the application layer. This philosophy says “failures will happen – you just shouldn’t have your whole system go down as a result.” </p><p>Organizations are relying on scaled out server architectures, modern databases, database load balancing software, and <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/why-scalearc/use-cases/cloud-migration">cloud services</a> to enable active/active architectures that ensure business continuity. The toughest technology layer to support active/active operations is at the application tier, because apps are fed by data and are typically written to directly talk to the data tier. Leveraging database load balancing software in addition, like ScaleArc’s, provides the buffer between apps and the data tier to support active/active operations without changing the application code. ScaleArc is how <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/case-study/dellcom">Dell</a>, <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/case-study/nasdaq-1">Nasdaq</a>, and <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/case-study/microsoft">Microsoft</a> deliver zero downtime environments for their most critical apps.</p><p>The move from DR to continuous availability is paramount, and BA’s pain is simply example of a company paying the price for not getting to that business model already.</p>auto failoverFri, 02 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMThttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/6/2/a-power-outage-ba-has-a-lot-of-explaining-to-doAnother Day, Another Award for ScaleArc!http://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/5/11/another-day-another-award-for-scalearc
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<img src="http://www.scalearc.com/media/blog/9CDED9F9-5056-9F3C-579C2F6BC9A02A99/images/o/aba17_gold_winner.jpg" style="width: 177px; padding-right: 12px; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 5px 0px;" alt="Blog image">
We did it again! The ScaleArc software has repeatedly earned kudos in the industry, from our <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/customers" style="font-size: 14px;">customers</a>, from <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/blog/2015/8/2/gartner-likes-us-they-really-like-us" style="font-size: 14px;">Gartner</a>, and from <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/press/2016/12/7/scalearc-selected-for-database-trends-and-applications-2017-trend-setting-products-list" style="font-size: 14px;">industry press</a>. Today we announced our software won a&nbsp;<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/press/2017/5/11/scalearc-wins-gold-stevie-award-in-2017-american-business-awards">Gold Stevie® Award</a>– the top winner of New Product of the Year in Software for Cloud Infrastructure.</p><p>Nicknamed the Stevies for the Greek word meaning “crowned,” the American Business Awards are the nation’s premier business awards program. ScaleArc earned this top recognition from among 3,600 nominations.</p><p>ScaleArc won for its Amazon Aurora support on its ScaleArc for MySQL software. The software <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/press/2016/11/29/scalearc-s-database-load-balancing-software-now-compatible-with-amazon-aurora">complements the Aurora PaaS offering</a> by enabling app-transparent failover, zero downtime maintenance, and faster performance – all without any code changes to the application.</p><p>What made us all so proud were the comments directly from the judges of our software. Their statements of praise included:</p><p><em>“Seamless aggregation of capacity is great, even better is avoiding dev time recoding. A very useful market solution!”</em></p><p><em>“A key element is that ScaleArc’s database load balancing software enables enterprises to run database workloads in the cloud without application changes and without compromising uptime and performance. Cost and time savings along with revenue enhancements were demonstrated.”</em></p><p><em>“Excellent product.”</em></p><p>A lot of apps can’t easily migrate to the cloud, and ScaleArc solves that challenge – enabling existing apps to run in cloud environments with no code changes. ScaleArc also mitigates the uptime and performance challenges the cloud can create – read more to learn how <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/why-scalearc/use-cases/cloud-migration">ScaleArc helps cloud adoption</a>.</p><p>Congrats to the entire ScaleArc team – especially our rock star engineers who build our amazing, prize-winning software. We love to celebrate this kind of industry recognition!</p>Thu, 11 May 2017 00:00:00 GMThttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/5/11/another-day-another-award-for-scalearcThe UK’s NHS – Leveraging Azure and ScaleArc for Easy Scale, Zero Downtimehttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/4/12/the-uk-s-nhs-leveraging-azure-and-scalearc-for-easy-scale-zero-downtime
<p>
<img src="http://www.scalearc.com/media/blog/AAF51C5B-5056-9F3C-5713BFD090614AC6/images/o/NHS2v.jpg" style="width: 177px; padding-right: 12px; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 5px 0px;" alt="Blog image">England’s National Health Service generates some amazing stats:</p><ul>
<li>world’s largest and oldest single-payer healthcare system<br>
</li><li>employs 1.5 million people</li>
<li>helps more than 1 million patients every 36 hours</li></ul><p>
NHS Choices, the online interface to the NHS’s education and information resources, understandably has a scaling challenge – the website has to support more than 50 million visits every month. As often happens, the database proved the most challenging technology layer to scale.
</p><p>
NHS Choices runs on Azure, and the IT team leverages a mix of SQL Server versions. The big struggles were maintaining app performance, despite legacy architectures, maintenance windows, and unplanned failover.</p><p>
<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/case-study/nhs-choices" target="_blank">Check out the full case study</a> to read more about how NHS Choices leveraged a combination of Azure and ScaleArc to</p><ul>
<li>support zero downtime maintenance and database upgrades</li>
<li>deliver automatic read/write split for faster performance</li>
<li>enable app-transparent failover across Azure regions</li></ul>Azurezero-downtimeWed, 12 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMThttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/4/12/the-uk-s-nhs-leveraging-azure-and-scalearc-for-easy-scale-zero-downtimePrepping for Black Friday Successhttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/4/6/prepping-for-black-friday-success
<p>
<img src="http://www.scalearc.com/media/blog/A9C85A1D-5056-9F3C-57C1852588DFEFD5/images/o/bigstock-Black-Friday-sale-sml.jpg" style="width: 177px; padding-right: 12px; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 5px 0px;" alt="Blog image">
It’s that time of year again, when the IT staff at eCommerce companies is staring down a looming deadline – get the infrastructure ready for the Black Friday surge in the next few months or risk the lost revenue and bad headlines that follow a meltdown.</p><p>Here at ScaleArc, lots of our customers are in the throes of these Black Friday preparations. They’re working on projects like&nbsp;<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/why-scalearc/use-cases/database-scalability">scaling the database</a>, enabling&nbsp;<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/why-scalearc/use-cases/active-active-data-centers">active/active operations</a>, optimizing application code, and i<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/why-scalearc/use-cases/app-performance-improvement">ncreasing website performance</a>.</p><p>To share more information on the steps you can take to prep for Black Friday, we’re hosting a&nbsp;<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/virtual-meet-up-get-expert-advice-on-black-friday-prep">virtual meet up</a> in a couple weeks. Leading the discussion is Craig Thayer, CTO for Sazze, which is the parent company to a range of eCommerce sites. One of the properties, BlackFridayFM, goes from nearly zero traffic to being one of the world’s most popular iPhone apps on Black Friday. So he has the fun task of prepping for a nearly infinite increase in traffic.</p><p>Craig will be sharing his timeline for Black Friday prep – what he does at which points of the year – and the combination of technology and process he uses to deliver Black Friday success, year after year. You can check out some of the company’s Black Friday metrics in this&nbsp;<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/blog/2015/12/14/another-black-friday-another-record-broken-thanks-scalearc">guest blog from Craig</a>. And tune in to our&nbsp;<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/virtual-meet-up-get-expert-advice-on-black-friday-prep">virtual meet up</a>&nbsp;on April 26 to get more details.</p>blogdatabase-availabilityBlack-Fridayapplication-availabilityauto failoverThu, 06 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMThttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/4/6/prepping-for-black-friday-successThe Hidden Cost of “Dark” DRhttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/3/17/the-hidden-cost-of-dark-dr
<p>
<img src="http://www.scalearc.com/media/blog/A67A5C7A-5056-9F3C-5763F8830BC8B028/images/o/bigstock-Dollar-currency-sign-graph-and-85139132_sml.jpg" style="width: 177px; padding-right: 12px; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 5px 0px;" alt="Blog image">
For decades, Disaster Recovery (DR) has dominated the landscape as the best architecture for business continuity. The problem is, DR expects you to have a disaster, and then to recover from that disaster. Because that capacity sits idle until disaster strikes, many customers call that “Dark DR.”</p><p>
In today’s digital business world, of course, disasters aren’t tolerated well. A majority of organizations cite considerable loss to revenue and/or reputation if their online offerings go down. Rather than build DR structures, organizations today need to design for Continuous Availability. Continuous availability, in turn, requires active/active architectures.</p><p>
Active/active designs present their own challenges – they cost more, and they’re complicated to build. Turns out, though, that new technologies and new designs are reducing the technical complications, and the economics of active/active don’t match the mythology.</p><p>
Business executives have long been frustrated by the cost of idle hardware – a depreciating asset on the books, these leaders have been looking for a way to gain value from these “offline” assets. At the same time, many IT folks have held misconceptions about the cost of moving to active/active architectures, overestimating the price tag.</p><p>
When you move to an active/active architecture, you do pay more. You now need to pay for software on active resources rather than have “free” software on idle hardware. But the notion that moving to active/active architectures doubles your costs is wrong. It overlooks the fact that you can use less hardware, which helps offset the higher software costs.</p><p>
Let’s look at the math:</p><p>
DR Scenario:</p><ul>
<li>48 active cores of database capacity</li>
<li>96 cores of hardware (half active, half idle)</li>
<li>48 cores of database license (only purchased for active cores)</li>
<li>total operating capacity: 48 cores</li></ul><p>
Active/active scenario</p><ul>
<li>64 active cores of database capacity (32 in each site)</li>
<li>64 cores of hardware (all active)</li>
<li>64 cores of database license (now needed in both locations)</li>
<li>total operating capacity: 64 cores</li></ul><p>
<img src="http://www.scalearc.com/media/blog/A67A5C7A-5056-9F3C-5763F8830BC8B028/images/o/diagram_final.jpg"></p><p>
When you factor in list pricing for servers, database licenses, and – in the active/active scenario – the hardware and software costs for database load balancing software to enable active/active operations at the database tier, the costs tally to:</p><ul>
<li>DR = $805,000</li>
<li>active/active = $1,063,200</li></ul><p>
Yes – active/active costs more than DR, but only by about 20%. That’s nowhere near the “active/active will double my costs” myth a lot of folks have in mind. This 20% increase in net cost delivers tremendous benefits that, from an overall cost to the business, outweigh the capital costs. For 20% more spend, you get:</p><ul>
<li>33% increased capacity</li>
<li>Failover within and between data centers</li>
<li>Zero downtime maintenance</li>
<li>Faster app performance</li>
<li>Opex savings – no DR team</li>
<li>Improved asset utilization</li></ul><p>
Check out our&nbsp;resources for all the details on how you can overcome the technical challenges of implementing an active/active architecture and reap the benefits of the Continuous Availability model it enables:
<br>
<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/wplp-the-hidden-cost-of-dark-dr">White paper</a>
<br>
<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/the-hidden-cost-of-dark-dr-slideshare">PowerPoint Presentation</a></p><p>
<em>Follow Michelle McLean on <a href="https://twitter.com/michellermclean">Twitter</a> or connect with her on <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/michellemclean/">LinkedIn</a></em><em>.</em></p>IT infrastructureenterprisealwaysonFri, 17 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMThttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/3/17/the-hidden-cost-of-dark-drThe Chief Data Officer – The Next Great IT Role or a Sign of Failure?http://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/3/8/the-chief-data-officer-the-next-great-it-role-or-a-sign-of-failure
<p>
<img src="http://www.scalearc.com/media/blog/3CA08290-5056-9F3C-57B95FD4EF4C70C8/images/o/CDO.jpg" style="width: 177px; padding-right: 12px; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 5px 0px;" alt="Blog image">
I’m just back from Gartner’s Data and Analytics conference this week, and Gartner analysts spent the week making a passionate case for the critical role of the Chief Data Officer or CDO. This opinion stands in stark contrast to observations from a CIO conference I attended, where speakers argued that a CDO was a sign of failed alliances, needed only when the CIO and CMO can’t get along.</p><p>
So which is it – the next great title to aspire to in IT, or proof that execs haven’t grown up?</p><p>
Clearly, data is the lifeblood of all organizations today – or needs to be. Proper collecting, connecting, wrangling, and understanding of that data underlies any enterprise’s ongoing health. Organizations that fail to apply the appropriate controls to and extract maximum value out of their data will fail to thrive. From that perspective, it’s easy to argue for a CDO, an exec with a full seat at the table whose mandate is to “get it right” when it comes to data.
</p>
<p>
In my view, though, the notion of a CDO is a fad. I can’t imagine any CIO worth his or her salt not making data a central focus. Maybe the Gartner need for a CDO gets satisfied by having a very senior data leader who reports into the CIO, but I don’t buy the idea of data sitting in a role separate from the CIO. It’s an artificial separation and one that would likely inspire turf wars. The more cynical side of me sees all this Gartner promotion of the CDO as a way for them to make news and sell more subscription seats (Google “chief data officer images” – the majority of the first 20 or 30 hits is all Gartner materials).
</p>
<p>
Now, there’s a great chance I’m wrong, and the CDO is here to stay. I used to be an analyst at META, one of the several firms gobbled up by Gartner, and I was wrong there on occasion. But my gut says that while we have to “get it right” when it comes to data, we don’t need CDOs to do that.
</p>
<p>
What do you think? Does your organization have a CDO? Do you want to be a CDO? Is the CIO just too busy to get this right? Share your thoughts in our comments section.
</p>
<p>
<em>Follow Michelle McLean on&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/michellermclean">Twitter</a>&nbsp;or connect with her on&nbsp;<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/michellemclean/">LinkedIn</a></em><em>.</em>
</p>blogCIOGartnerWed, 08 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMThttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/3/8/the-chief-data-officer-the-next-great-it-role-or-a-sign-of-failureSurviving the “Trump Effect”http://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/2/1/surviving-the-trump-effect
<p><img src="http://www.scalearc.com/media/blog/CA00A3D4-5056-9F3C-578B1E6733901C10/images/o/protests2.jpg" style="width: 177px; padding-right: 12px; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 5px 0px;" alt="Blog image">
As President Trump begins his administration, he continues to use a variety of channels to send messages about his thoughts and plans. These can take many forms – tweets, Executive Orders, even off-the-cuff comments in a speech or press conference. And we’ve seen the impact these communiques have had – moving stock prices, spurring protests, and generating press frenzies.</p><p>Most people simply observe these reactions – but some organizations have been majorly impacted by any of these acts by President Trump. This past weekend, for example, in the wake of President Trump’s Executive Order banning immigrant from predominantly Muslim countries, the ACLU found its website crashing under the load of handling an enormous spike in online donations.</p><p>
So when an organization like the ACLU finds itself unexpectedly in one of these Trump effects – to its benefit or detriment – the IT staff may be under instant pressure to reinforce its systems to accommodate significant traffic surges. The following steps may help as a fast response:</p><ul>
<li>Leverage cloud capacity – if there are resources already set up to run in the cloud, consider expanding capacity dedicated to those applications and data sources. Public-facing sites and applications in particular should be ready to take advantage of this kind of surge capacity.</li> <li>Reinforce web resources – you can increase web server capacity fairly easily, leveraging additional hardware for scale out paired with TCP load balancers to distribute the load. Augmenting the infrastructure with additional horizontal scale out will help keep a public website that’s seeing major traffic surges online.</li> <li>Focus on database resources – the database is often the weakest link in many organizations’ technology stacks. Without high-performing database, your apps and web servers will grind to a halt – and “slow” becomes the same as “down.” Monitor your databases’ performance, and, like with the web tier, consider adding more servers, as readable secondaries. ScaleArc can let you do database scale out with no application code changes, will distribute the load evenly, and will make database failovers invisible to your customers.</li> <li>Monitor the complete application stack – look to Application Performance Monitoring software for a holistic view of your customers’ experiences. Where are the bottlenecks in your application’s overall performance? What recommendations can the software make for root cause and troubleshooting?</li></ul><p>
All of these actions, of course, are easier to undertake with some advanced warning. Any organization that anticipates it could be impacted by the Trump effect should plan ahead with these steps as much as practical. IT teams in such organizations should look across the full technology stack and identify quick steps they can take to make their systems more robust.</p>database-load-balancingclouddatabase-scalabilityWed, 01 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMThttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/2/1/surviving-the-trump-effect2017 Prediction: The Death of DRhttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/1/3/2017-prediction-the-death-of-dr
<p>
<img src="http://www.scalearc.com/media/blog/F7EE626D-5056-9F3C-574A3B9889B802BF/images/o/Businessman-Predicting-Future.jpg" style="width: 177px; padding-right: 12px; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 5px 0px;" alt="Blog image">Enterprises have spent billions of dollars and decades of time honing their Disaster Recovery (DR) plans and processes – 2017 will be the year that DR will die. How could such a central tenet of IT operations disappear? Simply put – it just doesn’t cut it anymore.</p><p>
DR depends on having a second set of resources – equipment, data, people – ready to take over operations when your first location experiences a disaster. You maintain those systems miles away, to avoid a natural disaster from taking out both locations. You practice the transition of operations at least once a year, and you document every step needed to succeed in the transition. This mode is called active/passive or active/idle.</p><p>The problem with DR is that it has “disaster” as its foundation, from which you “recover” to a second alternative site. The idea of your business withstanding downtime – even short-lived downtime – doesn’t fly in today’s digital world.</p><p>So what will we do instead of DR? Continuous availability.</p><p>Designing for continuous availability means you’re running operations in multiple locations all in active mode. This mode is called active/active. </p><p>Continuous availability offers a broad set of advantages. The first is obvious – you’re continually operating rather than failing and then recovering. So your customers never see a loss of service.</p><p>Continuous availability also offers other advantages, too. </p><p>First, it’s more economical. Let’s take the simple case of two data centers. With DR, you build 100% of your capacity in your second data center. You need to, in case it ever has to take over – it has to offer the same horsepower as your primary site. But all that equipment, WAN connectivity, personnel at the ready – and you never use it! It sits idle, depreciating, and not servicing any of your customer needs. </p><p>With continuous availability, you design for a lower capacity – perhaps 70% in both location – but you’re running live operations in both locations simultaneously. You can do that because you never run your primary site at full load – if you hit 50% utilization, you increase capacity. </p><p>So at 70% in both, you’ve got 140% of capacity, and even if just one site has to handle all operations, it’s got the capacity to do so. So now you’ve spent 140% instead of 200%, so you’re ahead on equipment costs. You’re getting full utilization out of the equipment instead of having it sit dark. </p><p>Second, active/active operations increase performance. With services running in multiple locations, your customers will see a faster response time to their requests. Many organizations choose to run active/active operations quite far apart, so users on each side of the country can be serviced by a data center much closer to them. Avoiding the delays of traversing a long WAN link will boost throughput.</p><p>But the active/active operations needed to deliver continuous availability also brings its challenges. Building another set of servers, networks, and WAN links is fairly simple – having data straddling two locations is where things get sticky. You’ve got to invest in modern databases that support scale out and can have servers in multiple locations with replicated data. Then you’ve got to ensure your applications know how to talk to those databases. One trick is to leverage software like ScaleArc’s database load balancing software to enable your apps to read from multiple database servers as if they were one large single server.</p><p>Continuous availability, leveraging active/active operations, is essential to meeting today’s digital business demands. Your team will have new tricks to learn, but you’ll deliver the service level, strong economics, and high performance that define success in 2017.</p>database-availabilityauto failoverTue, 03 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMThttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2017/1/3/2017-prediction-the-death-of-drScaleArc Gives Back – Realizing a Long-standing Goalhttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2016/12/16/scalearc-gives-back-realizing-a-long-standing-goal
<p>
<img src="http://www.scalearc.com/media/blog/63BEBAD4-5056-9F3C-575B5AC67969BE0C/images/o/Giveback logo.jpg" style="width: 177px; padding-right: 12px; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px;" alt="ScaleArc Gives Back logo">Just last week we launched our ScaleArc Gives Back program, realizing a goal I’ve held during my time here at ScaleArc.</p><p>
A few years back, I enjoyed a passionate conversation over lunch with a small group of people, including Marc Benioff, the founder and CEO of Salesforce.com. I became inspired by his 1-1-1 model for philanthropy and the resulting Pledge 1% movement. Giving back to our communities, on a global scale, has been a goal of mine for ScaleArc throughout my tenure here. The people of our company have consistently demonstrated the desire and ability to help others, and now we have the opportunity to do that collectively as a company.</p><p>
<img src="http://www.scalearc.com/media/blog/63BEBAD4-5056-9F3C-575B5AC67969BE0C/images/o/giveback.jpg" style="width: 350px; padding-left: 12px; float: right; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px;" alt="blog image">
We kicked off our ScaleArc Gives Back program last Friday, when members of our staff from our headquarters location went to the Second Harvest Food Bank in San Jose and sorted food for people in need. We had a great time managing 9000 pounds of oranges and were inspired by the difference Second Harvest is making in our community, especially during the holiday season.</p><p>
Also last week, I signed ScaleArc up as part of the Pledge 1% program, which means we will donate:</p><ul>
<li>1% of our <strong><u>time</u></strong> via volunteering days</li>
<li>1% of our <strong><u>product</u></strong> as software donations to non-profit organizations</li>
<li>1% of <strong><u>financial resources</u></strong>, in our case profit</li></ul><p>
In addition, for this holiday season we have donated to a charity on behalf of our customers, in lieu of sending them gifts they really don’t need.</p><p>
I’m excited for ScaleArc to explore all the ways we can fulfill our 1% pledge, and I encourage other leaders in the tech community – even the smallest of startups – to read more about
<a href="http://www.salesforce.org/pledge-1">the Pledge 1% program</a> and sign up your company as well!</p>blogFri, 16 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMThttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2016/12/16/scalearc-gives-back-realizing-a-long-standing-goalRecognizing Heroeshttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2016/12/15/recognizing-heroes
<p>
<img src="http://www.scalearc.com/media/blog/077FA25F-5056-9F3C-570B4EA32F322C3D/images/o/DealerSocket_team2.jpg" style="width: 177px; padding-right: 12px; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px;" alt="blog image">
“Getting this award is quite the honor – you guys made me look good!” So says our<span style="background-color: initial;"><a href="http://www.scalearc.com/press/2016/12/15/scalearc-selects-dealersocket-s-michael-atkins-as-uptime-hero"> latest Uptime Hero</a>, Michael Atkins, director of IT operations for DealerSocket. But he’s got it backwards – he and his team make ScaleArc look good, leveraging our software to deliver 99.999 uptime, as he shared in his&nbsp;<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/dealersocket-video">video</a>.</span>&nbsp;</p><p>
Talking with customers like Michael about their successes – and what that success means to their own customers – is my favorite part of the job. Michael and his team run a global customer lifecycle management platform for auto dealers across the globe. “If we’re not running, our dealers’ businesses aren’t running.”</p><p>
It’s simple – make sure the DealerSocket SaaS platform stay up. All the time. Despite database outages, and despite maintenance windows. OK – not so simple.</p><p>
Despite the challenge, Michael and his team have done just that, using a combination of ScaleArc and Modern SQL Server to deliver the capacity, failover capabilities, and faster performance needed to keep pace. As Michael shared in their&nbsp;<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/media/resources/casestudy/45B95326-5056-9F3C-57924E156904F208/dealersocket-1.pdf">case study</a>, “We’ve had database outages, and thanks to ScaleArc, our dealers have never noticed it.”</p><p>
Because DealerSocket’s customers are all over the globe, the timing available for maintenance windows had shrunk to just two hours, in the middle of the night on weekends. Now with ScaleArc, DealerSocket can do maintenance on database servers in the middle of the day – any day – and customers will never see it. The company is also using ScaleArc’s caching capabilities to drive up application performance.</p><p>
For upgrading their data tier for scale out, high resilience, and faster application times, we’re proud to name Michael our latest Uptime Hero. Do you know an Uptime Hero? <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/UptimeHero" style="font-size: 14px;">Nominate him or her</a>! We love to share uptime success stories like these.</p>sql-serverauto failoverThu, 15 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMThttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2016/12/15/recognizing-heroesHoliday Horror Fears – Survey Finds High Concern over Airline Site Downtimehttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2016/12/13/holiday-horror-fears-survey-finds-high-concern-over-airline-site-downtime
<p>
<img src="http://www.scalearc.com/media/blog/A416EDD6-5056-9F3C-57A7E27D2250BCFB/images/o/HolidayTravelSurveyBlog.jpg" style="width: 177px; padding-right: 12px; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px;" alt="blog image">
As people all over the globe get ready to visit family during the holidays, <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/press/2016/12/13/scalearc-holiday-travel-survey-nearly-half-of-americans-fear-underperforming-airline-booking-apps-and-sites-will-hurt-their-holiday-spirit">ScaleArc’s latest survey</a> shows many Americans fear that airline database downtime could mean they lose time with loved ones or they’ll experience flight delays.</p><p>
Depending on their business, ScaleArc’s customers experience
<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/why-scalearc/use-cases/database-scalability" style="font-size: 14px;">surges in website or application use</a> at different times of the year. For our eCommerce customers, it’s Black Friday. For our movie ticketing customers, it’s blockbuster releases. For our airline customers, the holidays always deliver a surge both in passengers and website/mobile app usage.</p><p>ScaleArc wanted to understand how downtime or poor performance on those sites or apps affects travelers, so we surveyed 1008 Americans in late November to understand what kinds of problems they’d experienced to date, what fears they had for upcoming issues, and how they responded to poor availability or service on these critical apps.</p><p>You can check out the survey highlights in <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/media/resources/productinfo/A53DFDAA-5056-9F3C-5710CFF6DCBB898D/infographic-holiday-travel-survey.pdf">this infographic</a>. Amongst the findings:</p><ul><li>33% have experienced airline booking sites running slowly or going down in the past year<br><ul><li>9% say they’ve seen these apps be slow or down more times than they could count</li></ul></li><li>68% admit to taking retaliatory action when they’re frustrated by slow apps<br><ul><li>31% book through a different site</li><li>17% fly with a competitor</li><li>9% said they might never fly with that airline again</li></ul></li><li>42 % said airline database downtime would negatively impact their holiday<br><ul><li>21% fear time with loved ones will be cut short</li><li>19% are worried they might miss spending holidays with loved ones altogether</li><li>18% are concerned they’d suffer flight delays</li></ul></li></ul><p>Millennials voiced the greatest concern about their reliance on airline sites and apps for getting home for the holidays. Here’s how different age groups responded to the question “how important is an airline’s site or mobile app for ensuring a happy holiday with your family?”</p><ul><li>Millennials (18-34 year-olds): 56%</li><li>Gen Xers (35-44 year-olds): 48%</li><li>Baby Boomers (45-64 year-olds): 50%</li><li>Seniors (adults 65+): 37%</li></ul><p><a href="http://www.scalearc.com/case-study/virgin-america" style="font-size: 14px;">Virgin America</a> took steps a couple years ago to improve uptime and performance for its online ticketing app. As airlines prep for the surge in travelers, we’re all hoping it’s not the database that causes any traveling delays. We here at ScaleArc wish you and yours safe travels wherever the holidays take you this year.</p>databaseapplication-availabilityapplication-performanceTue, 13 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMThttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2016/12/13/holiday-horror-fears-survey-finds-high-concern-over-airline-site-downtimeWe won! We won! ScaleArc a “Trend-setting Product” for 2017http://www.scalearc.com/blog/2016/12/7/we-won-we-won-scalearc-a-trend-setting-product-for-2017
<p>
<img src="http://www.scalearc.com/media/blog/8AFF0054-5056-9F3C-57978B2C80F51C22/images/o/award logo.png" style="width: 177px; padding-right: 12px; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px;" alt="blog image">Even after shipping product for four years and winning customers like Nasdaq, Dell, and Microsoft, we here at ScaleArc still really love it when we win industry awards! This week, the recognition comes from Database Trends and Applications, the quality pub focused on database management, data science, and data center management.</p><p><a href="http://www.scalearc.com/press/2016/12/7/scalearc-selected-for-database-trends-and-applications-2017-trend-setting-products-list">DBTA named ScaleArc</a> one of its “Trend-Setting Products in Data and Information Management for 2017” today. The publication noted that it focuses on products that are both unique and effective in meeting the current and future needs of customers.</p><p>The ScaleArc software sure fits the bill. It enables organizations to deliver consumer-grade apps – apps that are never down, always fast, and scale anywhere. Our innovation lies in enabling organizations to automatically take advantage of modern, scaled out databases with no app changes – working with those databases to deliver <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/why-scalearc/use-cases/automated-failover-ha" style="font-size: 14px;">zero downtime</a>, <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/why-scalearc/use-cases/app-performance-improvement" style="font-size: 14px;">faster apps</a>, and <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/why-scalearc/use-cases/database-scalability" style="font-size: 14px;">easy scaling</a> across data centers or to the cloud.</p><p>Our thanks to the team at DBTA for the shout out – we appreciate the kudos. Check out all the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.dbta.com/Editorial/Trends-and-Applications/Trend-Setting-Products-for-2017-115127.aspx">winners</a> to see what you should be including in your tech stack!</p>databaseWed, 07 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMThttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2016/12/7/we-won-we-won-scalearc-a-trend-setting-product-for-2017Another Black Friday, Another eCommerce Meltdownhttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2016/11/29/another-black-friday-another-ecommerce-meltdown
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<img src="http://www.scalearc.com/media/blog/21E1D3A0-5056-9F3C-57DC9581AE5F5D94/images/o/ScaleArc-Black-Friday-112016.jpg" style="width: 177px; padding-right: 12px; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px;" alt="blog image">
Black Friday. Retailers know it's coming every year, and still – every year – someone has a spectacular failure. This year Macy's gets top billing – asking customers to wait to shop. Since 500 milliseconds of web delay is estimated to cost 5% of revenue, how much can we guess Macy's lost by asking EVERY shopper, for hours, to wait to shop? It's clearly in the millions of dollars. And how many of those who clicked over to Nordstrom's or Kohl's in frustration will just keep shopping on those other sites?</p><p><img src="http://www.scalearc.com/media/blog/21E1D3A0-5056-9F3C-57DC9581AE5F5D94/images/o/Scalearc_2016_11.jpg"></p><p>So what did Macy's get wrong? Scaling infrastructure for big traffic increases is fairly easy across most technology areas. Organizations know how to scale WAN links, network infrastructure, and web servers. So what did Macy's miss? Likely, the database.</p><p>"You have handle 5x to 15x your usual traffic on Black Friday," says Craig Thayer, CTO of Sazze, parent company to numerous eCommerce websites including Black Friday FM. "Turns out the database is the hardest part of the infrastructure to scale fast, because you have to also make application changes. You change the code, iterate, test, rinse and repeat."</p><p> <br>Often, when you can't reach a site or app during a busy time, it's the database that has hit a wall. Organizations of all sizes these days are rushing to take advantage of additional capacity in modern databases. Microsoft is pushing its SQL Server 2016 launch, and the open source world is embracing MySQL 5.6. Both modern databases offer more capacity and better failover, aimed at improving application uptime.</p><p>The challenge for organizations, as Sazze's Thayer points out, is that applications have to know how to talk to those databases. That takes time – and can't be done in rapid response in the middle of a Macy's meltdown during Black Friday. It's got to be done in advance.<br> <br>Organizations have a couple choices for how to adopt these databases. They can recode their apps – teaching those apps how to send some traffic to additional database servers to spread out the load. Or they can use technology like they have for their web server farms – load balancing technology – in front of their databases and have that software redirect the database load automatically. The benefit of using database load balancing software is that it avoids the application recoding – and subsequent "rinse and repeat" cycles that Sazze's Thayer is keen to avoid. So that option can often be implemented faster than recoding an app and provides additional benefits such as seamless failover.</p><p>Black Friday often serves as a warning for the rest of the December online shopping spree. The hope is that companies that experienced – or watched others have – a Black Friday meltdown can scale their infrastructure in time to be ready for that holiday shopping traffic.</p><p>Read the full&nbsp;<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/case-study/sazze">Sazze case study</a>.</p><p>This article was featured in&nbsp;<a href="http://www.apmdigest.com/black-friday-ecommerce-meltdown">APM Digest on 11/29/2016</a>.</p>blogeCommerceBlack-Fridayapplication-performanceauto failoverTue, 29 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMThttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2016/11/29/another-black-friday-another-ecommerce-meltdownAugment Amazon Aurora with Auto Scale Out, Seamless Failoverhttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2016/11/29/augment-amazon-aurora-with-auto-scale-out-seamless-failover
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<img src="http://www.scalearc.com/media/blog/D8433393-5056-9F3C-574B2CC5313877B0/images/o/amazon_aurora.png" style="width: 177px; padding-right: 12px; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px;" alt="blog image">As the AWS Re:Invent show kicks off today, ScaleArc is excited to&nbsp;<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/press/2016/11/29/scalearc-s-database-load-balancing-software-now-compatible-with-amazon-aurora">announce an upgrade to our software</a> that delivers compatibility with Amazon Aurora. The updated software extends the capabilities of AWS’s PaaS offering, adding:</p><ul>
<li>automatic scale out via read/write split</li>
<li>load balancing across Aurora’s read replicas</li>
<li>app-transparent failover</li>
<li>zero downtime maintenance</li>
<li>faster performance with app-transparent caching</li> </ul><p>To demonstrate the success of the enhanced offering, ScaleArc and Amazon customer Sixgill tested the new version of ScaleArc’s software. The<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/media/resources/thirdpartyresearch/D82D2BEB-5056-9F3C-57C66E5EF8E2B843/performance-test-results-for-scalearc-for-mysql-on-aurora-rds.pdf"> benchmark tests</a> confirmed that ScaleArc’s software, leveraging the Amazon Aurora APIs, improves the uptime and performance of apps running on Aurora. Among other results, the tests showed that ScaleArc:</p><ul>
<li>seamlessly scaled performance from 18K 000 QPS to 34K QPS with query load balancing across additional replicas with no application changes</li><li>scaled performance from 18K QPS to 46K QPS with query routing – again with no application changes</li><li>scaled read throughput more than 400%, from 36K to 160K, with app-transparent caching</li></ul><p>Beyond faster apps, the other big win for customers running ScaleArc on Amazon Aurora is better app uptime. Any cloud provider struggles to overcome customer concerns about running on infrastructure the customer no longer controls. Maintenance windows, for example, are now the domain of the cloud provider.</p><p>If you’re on Amazon Aurora or any other AWS offering, check out how ScaleArc can help improve your app uptime and performance. We invite you to&nbsp;<a href="http://info.scalearc.com/request-scalearc.html">run a free trial of the ScaleArc software</a> to see our capabilities in action.</p>AWSmysqlTue, 29 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMThttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2016/11/29/augment-amazon-aurora-with-auto-scale-out-seamless-failoverDigital Transformation – Making it a Reality, At Lasthttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2016/11/16/digital-transformation-making-it-a-reality-at-last
<p>
<img src="http://www.scalearc.com/media/blog/B64E6B4F-5056-9F3C-575B97F9260809F5/images/o/digital_transformation_img.jpg" style="width: 177px; padding-right: 12px; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px;" alt="blog image">In today’s world, Digital Transformation is the driving force behind business and remains at the top of every CEO/CIO/CTO’s priority list. What does Digital Transformation really mean to applications and their corresponding databases? It means that enterprise applications drive the business, “IT” is no longer a cost center, and databases are of even more mission-critical importance to the fundamental health and survival of companies. Every enterprise today is transforming into an online services company, often moving to the cloud, and changing the way they go to market as part of achieving Digital Transformation.</p><p>Yet the mission-critical transactional applications that drive the majority of business value – and rely on databases including Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL – still utilize an old protocol (SQL) and old architecture that work against Digital Transformation. Applications are still directly connected to, and hard coded for, their specific database environment. As a result, enterprise applications fail to deliver the levels of uptime demanded in our world today. These applications perform poorly, and scaling them is difficult, costly, and time consuming. These failings directly cost the business – in revenue or reputation. You can lose a deal, or a customer for life.</p><p>At the same time, people’s expectations of how *all* applications should behave have increased thanks to the likes of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and others. These applications are never down, always fast, and scale well – across millions of users and platforms. These consumer apps have totally reset our expectations for how an app should behave. Yet enterprise applications simply aren’t consumer grade because of the legacy way that mission-critical apps and the databases they use are architected and built.</p><p>Enter ScaleArc&hellip;.for 2016 and beyond.</p><p>ScaleArc makes applications consumer grade – never down, always fast, scale anywhere – with no code changes. Our database load balancing software drops into your existing environment transparently and enables apps to tap into the power of modern databases without writing a single line of code. Our software eliminates app downtime from database outages or maintenance windows, increases application performance, and automates scale out at the data tier.</p><p>There’s a good chance you’re already using ScaleArc. If you get a stock quote off Nasdaq.com, buy a laptop from Dell.com, or buy an airline ticket from Virgin America, you’ve used ScaleArc. Improved uptime and performance for apps translates directly into top-line growth and bottom-line savings for our delighted customers. Here are just a few examples of the tangible business benefits our customers have seen from deploying ScaleArc:</p><ul> <li><a href="http://www.scalearc.com/why-scalearc/financial-benefits#3M-revenue">$3M in increased revenue</a>, every year – from doubling website performance</li></ul><ul> <li><a href="http://www.scalearc.com/why-scalearc/financial-benefits#188-saved">$188K in revenue savings</a> – from avoiding application downtime during just one unplanned database outage</li></ul><ul> <li><a href="http://www.scalearc.com/why-scalearc/financial-benefits#2M-revenue">$2M in increased revenu</a>e, every year – from avoiding downtime from maintenance windows</li></ul><ul> <li><a href="http://www.scalearc.com/why-scalearc/financial-benefits#320k">$320K in savings</a> – from avoiding dev time recoding for database scaling</li></ul><ul> <li><a href="http://www.scalearc.com/why-scalearc/financial-benefits#2x-faster">2x faster app rollou</a>t – from dev time avoided</li></ul><p>ScaleArc enables you to deliver the consumer-grade apps needed for successful Digital Transformation. Wherever you are in your transformation journey, come see how ScaleArc can accelerate your success.</p>databasecloudenterpriseSaaSWed, 16 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMThttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2016/11/16/digital-transformation-making-it-a-reality-at-lastToday’s Requirement: Delivering Continuous App Availabilityhttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2016/11/14/today-s-requirement-delivering-continuous-app-availability
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<img src="http://www.scalearc.com/media/blog/E8B2FD6F-5056-9F3C-57971084DE3C9F73/images/o/pragmatic works webinar img.JPG" style="width: 177px; padding-right: 12px; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px;" alt="blog image">
Late last week, we hosted a webinar with our SI partner Pragmatic works to discuss how to architect for Continuous Availability. The audience asked a ton of great questions about the role of a modern database in improving app uptime and how to complement that database with other techniques to enable a zero downtime environment.</p><p>
We’re also offering a great assessment offer to help you architect continuous availability into your IT stack – read on for more details.</p><p>Polling at the start showed some interesting characteristics about the audience:</p><ul><li>Solid use of AlwaysOn – 40% are already using AlwaysOn – that jibes with anecdotal findings from the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/blog/2016/11/8/using-alwayson-except-not-really">Ignite and PASS conferences</a> </li><li>Big plans for SQL Server 2016 – 53% plan to upgrade, and another 26% are investigating doing so</li><li>74% have maintenance windows – those windows give them an opportunity for tasks like patching the database servers, but it also means app downtime</li><li>nearly 80% run multiple data centers – running operations across multiple data centers improves the foundation for continuous availability but introduces its own challenges in managing failover across the sites</li></ul><p>The Pragmatic Works team talked through options for enabling app uptime in various parts of the technology stack:</p><ul><li>in the code – you can build in logic for retries and for user/device locality, but it takes complicated engineering</li><li>in the network – redundancy at the network layer is essential, but it’s also not enough</li><li>using the cloud – the cloud can provide additional capacity and infrastructure, but not all apps are ready to use the smaller database instances in the cloud</li><li>at the data tier – modern databases, with horizontal scale out, can boost uptime, but the challenge is having apps ready to take advantage of it</li></ul><p>Pragmatic Works then highlighted how database load balancing software can complement the capabilities of a modern database such as SQL Server 2016 and make it easier to deliver continuous availability for applications. Then the ScaleArc team then highlighted how our database load balancing software prevents app downtime during&nbsp;<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/how-it-works/availability-features/automated-database-failover">unplanned database failovers</a>, enables&nbsp;<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/why-scalearc/use-cases/zero-downtime-maintenance">zero downtime maintenance</a>, and supports&nbsp;<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/how-it-works/performance-features/connection-pooling-and-multiplexing">connection management</a> and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/how-it-works/performance-features/transparent-in-memory-query-caching">app-transparent caching</a> to improve application uptime.</p><p>The audience had a constant stream of fantastic questions about how the two technologies – modern database and database load balancing software – work together to enable continuous availability:</p><p><strong>Why doesn’t AlwaysOn always revert back to the original primary node after failover? </strong>Different organizations apply different processes following failovers, and often the DBA wants to manage that process manually to ensure replication state, identify the failure reason, etc.</p><p><strong>What is the SQL licensing for primary and secondary servers? </strong>If you direct workload at the secondary, including making it a readable secondary, you have to pay for a license on that SQL Server.</p><p><strong>What happens if ScaleArc fails? Does it become my new single point of failure? </strong>The ScaleArc software deploys in HA pairs, linked via Heartbeat. If the primary ScaleArc instance fails, failover to the secondary is sub-second – it has all the credentials and cache entries configured already and immediately takes over. </p><p><strong>What happens to transactions in play during database failover? </strong>The ScaleArc software is ACID compliant, so when transactions bound for the primary have passed the ScaleArc device and then the primary fails, we’ll relay the failure notice and the app will handle the retry. Any transactions that come after the failover starts, the ScaleArc software will queue – once the failover completes, we’ll drain the queue in a FIFO manner, preserving transactional integrity. So the apps will see delay but not get error messages on those later transactions.</p><p><strong>Can ScaleArc help us avoid DoS attacks? </strong>Yes – in a couple ways. You can set the max number of connections ScaleArc will allow into the database server. We’ll queue the rest when you hit that max, avoiding overloading the server. We also provide extensive analysis on queries – you can use the ScaleArc software to then firewall certain queries, based on app, sending address, or other parameters. One customer used this technique to block a SQL injection attack – you can block any query with no code changes.</p><p><strong>How does ScaleArc work with ETL jobs? </strong>Those jobs tend to drive a huge volume of traffic that can tie up the primary database server. Often our customers, for ETL jobs, will do bulk inserts directly to the database server. ScaleArc also supports query routing, so you can designate a secondary to always take reporting requests and avoid interfering with transactional traffic.</p><p><strong>How does ScaleArc handle authentication between applications and databases?</strong> The ScaleArc software integrates with Active Directory, so we can handle authentication that way, or you can load credentials directly onto the ScaleArc software.</p><p><strong>If you need app credentials and not just database credentials, how does ScaleArc handle that?</strong> The ScaleArc software passes all those credentials directly through to the database. The database will think it’s a direct connection from the client, so we will relay Windows or SQL Server credentials.</p><p>To help our customers design their technology stack for continuous availability, we’re teaming with Pragmatic Works to offer an assessment – you can request your&nbsp;<a href="https://youtu.be/l5m-plHNW4o">personal consultation and assessment her</a>e. Thanks again to the audience for such a great discussion!</p>database-availabilitydatabase-scalingsql-serverapplication-performancealwaysonauto failoverMon, 14 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMThttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2016/11/14/today-s-requirement-delivering-continuous-app-availabilityUsing AlwaysOn... Except Not Really - Observations from Ignite and PASShttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2016/11/2/using-alwayson-except-not-really-observations-from-ignite-and-pass
<p>
<img src="http://www.scalearc.com/media/blog/9C0772FB-5056-9F3C-570CFD3E43422BD9/images/o/PASS2016.jpg" style="width: 177px; padding-right: 12px; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px;" alt="blog image">We’re just back from exhibiting at both PASS and Ignite in the past few weeks. We talked to – albeit briefly – about 2100 people across both shows. We also had some fun with a ScaleArc t-shirt contest – when we spotted folks in our “Don’t get caught with your apps down” shirt, we handed out gift cards! You can see one lucky winner here.</p><p>
Our conversations revealed a few interesting trends about SQL Server users today:</p><ul>
<li><strong>adoption of AlwaysOn has grown</strong> a lot – a far greater portion of the folks we talked to this year are running SQL Server 2012, 2014, or 2016. And a lot of them have implemented AlwaysOn as part of those deployments. We got a bunch of questions about how we <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/microsoft-sql-server-2016" style="font-size: 14px;">complement SQL Server 2016</a>, too, since we announced support for the updated release. So they’ve</li>
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<img src="http://www.scalearc.com/media/blog/9C0772FB-5056-9F3C-570CFD3E43422BD9/images/o/tshirt1.jpg" alt="blog image2" style="font-size: 14px; width: 200px; padding-right: 12px; float: right; margin: 40px 10px 10px;">
</p><li>&hellip; but
<strong>most enterprises still can’t fully use AlwaysOn</strong> – when we’d ask what capabilities they were running on AlwaysOn, it was pretty limited. They’re using the replication features, but the real power of AlwaysOn is doing read/write split and sending traffic to readable secondaries. Very, very few of the 1000 or so users running AlwaysOn that we talked to were using readable secondaries. The hitch? They have to recode the app, and most don’t have the time, ability, or risk tolerance. When they heard we do <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/how-it-works/availability-features/read-write-split" style="font-size: 14px;">read/write split automatically</a>, with no app changes, their eyes lit up.</li>
<li>people are
<strong>struggling to deploy active/active data centers</strong> – we also talked to folks about their HA environments. A lot noted that disaster recovery (DR) was losing favor. Rather than “recover” from a failure, most were looking for tips on how to design for continuous availability instead. The database failover portion is particularly tricky – or rather, <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/how-it-works/availability/automatic-failover-for-sql-server" style="font-size: 14px;">keeping the application up during that database failover</a> is tricky. Enabling customers to move operations from one data center to another, without app downtime, is something ScaleArc helps customers achieve, and interest in active/active ops has definitely increased this past year.</li>
<li><strong>maintenance windows are getting increasingly hard to call</strong> – we love asking folks about maintenance windows (we enable <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/why-scalearc/use-cases/zero-downtime-maintenance" style="font-size: 14px;">zero downtime maintenance</a> for our customers, so asking about these windows is like peeking into the past for us). Most noted that Saturday night is the only remaining time – and even then, they said, it’s challenging. Even the companies that aren’t global find the burden of getting approval for application downtime to be very painful.</li>
<li><strong>use of the cloud is still limited</strong> for mission-critical apps – a lot of folks talked about using the cloud for backup and recovery. Several were using it for app development. But very few had mission-critical apps running in the cloud – any cloud. The hesitation in <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/why-scalearc/use-cases/cloud-migration" style="font-size: 14px;">cloud adoption</a> tended to fall in two areas – often together: performance and uptime. One customer noted the instability of server availability made him hesitant to move database workloads to the cloud in particular.</li></ul><p>
The good news is people are leveraging more capabilities of Modern database architectures. The challenge remains having the application tier take advantage of those more sophisticated capabilities. Being able to share customer success stories from folks including
<a href="http://www.scalearc.com/case-study/dellcom">Dell</a>, <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/case-study/microsoft">Microsoft IT</a>, and <a href="http://www.scalearc.com/case-study/nasdaq-1">Nasdaq</a> – how they’re using database load balancing software to take advantage of Modern SQL – made for some great conversations at both PASS and Ignite.</p>Wed, 02 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMThttp://www.scalearc.com/blog/2016/11/2/using-alwayson-except-not-really-observations-from-ignite-and-pass